Bonifii partners with Entersekt, chooses Mastercard affiliate for open banking

Bonifii announced the addition of context-awareness powered by Entersekt to its biometric authentication method for credit unions in a new partnership, and has selected a Mastercard subsidiary as the preferred open banking provider for MemberPass, its compliant biometric digital identity service.

Bonifii adds Entersekt passwordless authentication to MemberPass Express

Bonifii, formerly known as CULedger, will incorporate context-aware passwordless authentication technology from Entersekt into MemberPass Express to help authenticate credit union customers as part of a new partnership.

Schalk Nolte, CEO of Entersekt, says the new solution uses AI to analyze the context of the user, such as their identity, behavior, location, device, and channel, to defend against fraud without resorting to passwords. A company announcement says the solution will allow users to authenticate in less than 10 seconds.

The solution will be folded into MemberPass Express, which leverages biometrics to authenticate customer identity when performing credit union services like e-commerce transactions, visiting a branch, contacting a call center, or logging in to online or mobile banking.

A pilot project with two credit unions is already in progress, the press release states.

In 2021, Entersekt signed a contract with Norwegian banks to provide biometric authentication for 4.3 million users by integrating the country’s BankID.

Finicity picked as preferred open banking provider for Bonifii

Bonifii has selected Mastercard subsidiary Finicity as its preferred open banking provider for its MemberPass credit unions to access consumer-permissioned bank data for more accurate and faster underwriting.

“MemberPass is the gold standard in the digital identity market, and as Bonifii’s preferred open banking provider, Mastercard will enable credit unions to step into the digital frontier through the use of consumer-permissioned data,” says John Ainsworth, CEO of Bonifii. “This will complement the current credit rating system by leveraging verification of income and assets for auto, personal and mortgage lending.”

With the development, Bonifii members can add consumer-permissioned data to MemberPass to access capital securely with the help of Mastercard. The open banking platform from Mastercard is said to deliver verification of income, asset, and employment reports directly to credit unions during the underwriting process using customer-permissioned data from the borrower. A separate announcement says it will enable a digital-first method where the borrower can instantly provide the necessary information to a credit union to make a lending decision and replaces the manual process. Bonifii also says it combats fraud and inaccuracies that credit union underwriters encounter.

“Mastercard’s ability to immediately verify account information, via open banking technology and consumer-permissioned data, will be imperative for competitive financial institutions, and digitizing account verification to enhance and better inform underwriting methods will play a critical role in the future of loan processing,” says Andy Sheehan, executive vice president of U.S. open banking at Mastercard.

Article Topics

AI  |  authentication  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  Entersekt  |  financial services  |  fraud prevention  |  Mastercard  |  open banking  |  secure transactions